A new study is lending weight to the theory that every memory is distributed across many neurons
in one region of the brain.

By watching patients with electrodes in their brains play a memory game, researchers found
that each such memory is committed to cells distributed across the hippocampus. Though the
proportion of cells responsible for each memory is small, the absolute number is in the millions.

So the loss of any one cell should not have a noticeable effect on memory, according to
researchers at the Dignity Health Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix.

Patients in the study memorized a list of words on a computer screen, then viewed a second
list that included those words and others. When asked to identify words they had seen earlier, the
patients displayed cell-firing activity consistent with the distributed model of memory.